Take-aways from 12min.me

Yesterday evening I attended the Munich chapter of 12min.me

This is where people talk for - wait for it - exactly 12 minutes on a subject close to them.

Yesterday's talk was in English and although focussed on intrapeneurship did have some useful takeaways:

• Planning more than one year is senseless
• Business plans are fake
• Start from the user
• Focus on customer lifetime value

• Team
• Fast decisions
• Know who does what when
• Timing - to market, technology waves
• Get the word out
• Signals and supporters
• 24/7
• Stopwatch v calendar
• Market check
• Send not only your show master but also your nerd when pitching

Steam-less

This morning I went to a business who may be one of our first two customers (and beta-testers).

Before that I had an MRI scan as a couple of weeks ago I had a migraine - only ever had one before years ago.

I also noticed that in the last few days I have been slowing down on the dev stuff.

I'm not saying I am burning out but tomorrow I am going to Bologna until Monday evening and am not taking my lappy. I will, though, be taking my tummy.

Serendipity

Yesterday morning I was going through my emails deleting most of them as I went along speed skimming just the first two lines.

One was from CrunchBase and mentioned the name of an investor at the last company I worked for.

I deleted it before my mind registered the name.

So then I had find it in my trash and recover it. It was news about this VC company combining funds with another VC.

I went on with the rest of my day which included meeting with an experienced executing and former professor who gave an excellent talk at the last AGBC Exchange. He was kind enough to agree to meet up for 15 minutes so we should show him the app and our lean startup canvass.

It was a very long 15 minutes (over an hour) and he gave good feedback and advice.

During our talk he mentioned that he was actually based in a room provided by a VC company - the same one. Oh, I chimed in, all super-up-to-date-on-things: I hear they have a new joint fund.

(I actually met them once at the company at a rather bloodied meeting).

Uplifting article

Well, a bit uplifting if you are in the mobile messaging app business (TechCrunch).

Take-aways from the AGBC Exchange

The Munich chapter of the American German Business Club once or twice a year has a Saturday morning event where there are various seminars held on different themes.

And this year it started with us, The Crazy Chicken and I, giving a three minute talk about our business's product.

Our approach was to start by telling (true) stories where businesses would have benefited from using our product - "if only there was an app for that".

Then The Crazy Chicken interrupted me and reminded me that I have been working on the app and carried on with a couple of more slides.

It seemed to go down well (I was congratulated by the president).

Then the seminars started. The most relevant one was also the most excellent, not least as it was run by a former professor who has worked in startup here and in Silicon Valley and has been involved in getting funding. We will be contacting him soon as he was happy to talk to us about the business and give feedback.

Here are the take-aways from the event:

• Customers should love the product and cannot do without it
• You need a revenue model, perhaps copy an existing one (as that should work) and know that a subscription model has advantages. Also the revenue stream should have low friction so it is trivial to understand and submit payments
• listen to customers and potential customers
• It's bad to not look closely enough at existing customer behaviour.
• Also bad not to be watching the competition and emerging trends
• Fund raisers should see a clear path to revenue

To summarise:

have a clear revenue model and product fit.

Takeaways from the Entrepreneurs Night - Silicon Valley Style Pitch Event

It was a toss-up between going and doing more app stuff but I decided to go.

Just before leaving for the event I had, in any case, fixed a major problem I had spent several days working on (and on which a real developer would have spent an hour on).

It was worth attending. As Axel Schultz, the organiser, said, it was the best pitch event so far, even against San Francisco and Berlin.

Here are my takeaway:

• should have a significant number of businesses who have been canvassed, preferably before writing code, but in the double figures
• "obsession makes a good entrepreneur"
• consider equity-based crowd funding where you actually get a 100 or so experienced investors who can help you. This becomes part of the value added investor thinking which also includes "smart money" 
• Axel like the idea of two people developing a business to actual traction
• Munich will probably take over from Berlin in terms of startup activity in two or three years
• For startups speed beats perfection

Not fantastic

When I go to the shops on the underground, tram or whatever, I am still working by reading startup and tech blogs on my mobile (now a bit easier with the iPhone 6s Plus).

And of course TechCrunch combines startup and technology subjects so is often read by me.

Seems we are reaching a point of inflection in the startup world according to this and this